Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Just so you know, Congress can force the release of Donald Trump's tax returns anytime it wants.

Though our new president may not realize it, Congress has the power to obtain his tax returns and reveal them to the public without his consent, including returns under audit. As just urged by Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.), legislators seeking information on President Trump’s possible conflicts of interest should immediately exercise this authority rather than wait for the passage of new veto-proof legislation — a highly uncertain prospect — that would have the same effect.

The ability of Congress to disclose confidential tax information was added to the law almost 100 years ago. Since the Civil War, when it began requiring taxpayers to submit private information to the government to comply with the tax laws, Congress has struggled to balance the privacy interests of taxpayers with the public’s right to know. Eventually, Congress decided that tax information should remain confidential except in two situations. First, it authorized the president to determine whether any tax information could be disclosed. And, in 1924, it gave the same power to certain congressional committees.

Congress’s right to reveal tax information independent of the president’s authority proved extremely important in 1973 and 1974, when President Richard Nixon became entangled in a controversy involving his claim of a sizable charitable deduction for giving his official papers to the National Archives..........Following Watergate, Congress changed the law to eliminate the president’s ability to order a disclosure. But it retained the right of its tax committees to do so as long as a disclosure served a legitimate committee purpose. Such a disclosure must be in the public’s interest, and today’s understandable concerns about Trump’s potential conflicts of interest would seem clearly to justify a congressional effort to obtain, investigate and possibly disclose to the public his tax information.

I am somewhat uncertain as to whether or not this can be done with only the Democrats in the House demanding it, but I think as time goes on there may be a number of Republicans who can be convinced to sign on as well.

At this point I am all but certain that Trump is terrified of having his tax records revealed, probably for a whole host of reasons, so there is no telling to what lengths he might go to keep this from happening.

However I am also convinced that there is overwhelming evidence that it is in the best interests of the country to have these tax records made public.

Amoral and mentally unbalanced. I've been in a couple of psychiatric hospitals (no, not as a patient) and have been around plenty of people who are far less functional than tRump, but I have never seen anyone look so obviously unhinged as our so-called POTUS.

Donnie also is known for cashing a check for 37 cents, back before all the bankruptcies.He is cash-poor. He has a lot of over-priced real estate that makes him appear uber wealthy to the ignorant. His next bankruptcy will reveal all this.

How long before Donald Trump begins attacking his own Supreme Court nominee? That’s the question now that Neil Gorsuch has privately criticized Trump for personally attacking federal judges this week, in a conversation with a U.S. Senator which has now become public. It turns out even Gorsuch can’t stomach the antics of the guy who just nominated him, and he can’t stay quiet about it.

"But roughly three dozen students who participated in the two programs while Mr. Gorsuch was at Harvard Law School from 1988 to 1991 said they have no recollection of his involvement."

"On a Senate questionnaire in connection with the 2006 judicial appointment, Mr. Gorsuch answered a question about “serving the disadvantaged” in part by saying he had done pro bono work beginning in law school, citing the two programs. He said he helped Massachusetts inmates “with respect to, among other things, hearings on disciplinary actions taken against them” and represented “defendants in criminal proceedings in Massachusetts state courts.”"

“If he was active in PLAP I am sure I would remember him,” said Elizabeth Buckley Lewis, who attended Harvard at the same time as Mr. Gorsuch. Now a New York City tax lawyer who advises nonprofits, she said PLAP was her “most meaningful experience” at Harvard.

"Sarah Reed, the general counsel of a venture-capital firm who said she was active in the Defenders throughout law school and who served as student president in 1991, doesn’t remember Mr. Gorsuch either.

"Schumer said Gorsuch would not say what he thought the founding fathers intended with the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bars government officials from accepting anything of value from foreign governments.

Schumer also said Gorsuch ducked questions on whether a Muslim ban would be constitutional and whether he had any opinions on conservative legal scholars who think Trump is already abusing his executive powers.

“He would have been no more biased than any of the justices sitting on the court,” Schumer said. “The judge today avoided answers like the plague.”

And he argued that if Gorsuch does not get 60, it should not necessarily prompt Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to use the so-called nuclear option to change the Senate’s rules to confirm the judge.

“Nothing forces them to change the rules,” Schumer said. “If the Supreme Court nominee doesn’t earn 60 votes, the answer is not to change the rules. It is to change the nominee who can garner the 60 votes. Because 60 votes means that it is almost definitionally a bipartisan, mainstream nominee.”"

I do wish these headlines would stop with the hyperbolic language designed to get a click.If that language is "criticizing" Donnie Tinyhands, I'll eat my hat. Critical language would be more like, "I think the president is certifiable, and is in direct opposition to the law and the wishes of the people. He should be hauled into federal court for...(fill in the blank)""Demoralizing" & "disheartening" aren't exactly strong words one uses when one wants to go on the offense. Give me a fucking break.

It turns out Sean Spicer’s online sloppiness extends well beyond the mere fact that he keeps tweeting his own password. Due to what can only be explained by either a total cluelessness about how websites work, or by a desire to save ten bucks a year, Spicer’s home address and email address and personal phone number have leaked out to the general public in a manner which didn’t even require any hacking – because he left the info online in plain sight all along.

"Does the Trump administration understand computer security at all? This is not a rhetorical question. Trump uses an unsecured Android phone, an intelligence agency’s security nightmare, because he can’t let go of his Twitter feed. Multiple administration Twitter feeds didn’t even bother with two-factor identification, making the private emails tied to them simple to discover. And now we learn Sean Spicer, press secretary, public figure, and password Tweeter left his Venmo account public.

Venmo, if you’re unfamiliar, is an app that allows you to request payment from, or send payment to, anybody you’ve added as a friend. It’s generally used to split checks, cover small sums, and other costs. If an account is public, that means anyone can do this, so guess what happened to Spicer?"

"New York Magazine noted that the account’s both being buried under insulting donations and, of course, people demanding he pay up for various insults to the American public. It’s not entirely clear that the account is legit, and it appears that Spicer isn’t exactly a power user if it is, although that he has a lobbyist on his Venmo is either hilarious or unnerving depending on your perspective. But it’s also a symptom of a potential national security disaster.

It’s difficult, at this point, to determine whether the Trump administration is simply ignorant of basic information security or actively contemptuous of even the basic rules of protecting data or federal records. You can make a case either way, depending on how you interpret the current White House staff struggling to work the light switches. Not to mention how Trump’s staff deletes and replaces his tweets despite it potentially being a violation of federal records law."

"That members of the Trump administration can’t even think to take social media accounts private forces us to ask what other common sense security protocols are being ignored in the White House. Making an account private, especially one tied to your credit cards, is just common sense even if you’re not on television every single week. The Trump administration needs to start taking cybersecurity seriously, or it may be putting Americans at risk."

Currently, there are 48 Democrats in the U.S. Senate. We need to elect 3 more Democrats in the November 6, 2018 election to become a majority.

It will take 24 additional Democrats to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives. When this is achieved, the Democrats can elect a new Speaker of the House (not Pelosi please) and control of all committees and subcommittees.

And Manchin may vote Dem for some things, like the Violence Against Women Act's re-upping, but he's voting too GOP now with his seat on the line. I bet he loses his next election. When he's shocked, Trump will remind him of his snake poem and tell Manchin he was an idiot to think Trump wouldn't take his seat from him. We need to get one more Dem seat.

The plan was hatched after lawyer Ruth Eisenberg saw McConnell shut Senator Elizabeth Warren down on the Senate floor last night as she read the letter.

McConnell scolded, "She was warned. She was given an explanation. She persisted."

"We felt he should have listened to it last night on the Senate floor, and since he wouldn't listen to it last night, we will read it to him tonight," says Eisenberg, a lawyer in her 60s whose practice represents non-profits. Though she's participated in protests before, including the Women's March and another recent rally, this is the first time Eisenberg is helping lead the charge.

It started with another friend's comment on Facebook, saying women should read King's letter to McConnell at his own abode. The conversation grew from there.

Eisenberg asked if anyone knew where the Senate majority leader lives. Somebody did. She asked if anyone had a bullhorn. Someone else had one.

"We're just regular D.C. people—parents, grandparents, regular citizens of the District of Columbia and Maryland," she says, adding that some are longtime activists and others have been more recently "activated by the president's policies and his general unfitness for office." They aren't planning any acts of civil disobedience outside McConnell's home and expect a small crowd.

"This protest is being led by women, but men and women oppose Jeff Sessions for attorney general and oppose the sexism of not allowing Senator Warren to speak," Eisenberg says.

This is how movements are born. One slimy moment after the next, with ordinary people rising up and saying that enough is enough. You go, Ruth Eisenberg!

No doubt he's unbalanced. He's unguarded with his facial expressions, like Sarah Palin with her ugly grimaces. Consider that Obama always looked great, in every situation.

And speaking of Palin reminds me, in the barber shop I was looking at Enquirer and saw a sidebar about Track's domestic violence. A man standing next to Sarah at some soiree, identified as Track, was not Track. Track would probably like to be as tall and well-dressed as this guy.

The Silencing Of Elizabeth Warren Was A Carefully Orchestrated Plot By Mitch McConnell

Assistant Democratic Leader Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said that the silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was a carefully orchestrated Republican plot. If this is the case, then the scheme has horribly backfired on Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his party.

...“Sen. Warren has a special talent to get under the skins of Republicans,” Durbin said. “I’m sure her speeches bother them more than the speeches of many Democrats.”

It would seem that Republican Sens. McConnell and Cornyn have been looking to silence Sen. Warren for quite a while. The fact that McConnell would choose to enforce a rule that is hardly ever enforced while Warren read a letter into the record suggests that Republicans had been targeting Sen. Warren and looking for an opportunity to flex their male GOP majority entitlement for a while.

The idea that this was a plot to target Warren makes even more sense when one considers that three male Senators were allowed to finish reading the Coretta Scott King letter into the record with no objections from Republicans. The rules violation was never about the letter that Warren was reading. The silencing was all about punishing Sen. Warren for speaking out. The Republican Senate old boys club wanted to put her in her place.

President Trump's attack on Nordstrom undermined his false image as a president for the people and confirmed the perception that Trump is using the platform of the presidency to make money.

...The mistake that the president made when he attacked Nordstrom was that he wasn’t using the bully pulpit to pretend to fight for manufacturing jobs. He used his platform as president to bully a company that he thought was mean to his daughter.

The President’s tweet confirmed the perception among voters that he is not honest, doesn’t care about people like them and doesn’t share their values. A new Quinnipiac University poll revealed that by a margin of 54%-42% respondents thought Trump was dishonest. By a margin of 52%-45%, respondents said Trump doesn’t care about average Americans, and 58% of those polled believed that President Trump does not share their values.

Trump and corporate America had a good scam going. Trump bellows about jobs, companies dredge up existing plans for expansion, and the President takes credit for saving the jobs.

TJ Maxx and Marshalls were already distancing themselves from Ivanka Trump, so the President’s attack won’t work. Trump proved that everything the American people believed about his character is true. He is a dishonest president who doesn’t share their values and is most interested in using the White House to make money for himself and his family.

Actions turn perceptions into reality, which is why Trump’s attack on Nordstrom was a big league mistake.

Of course WVA's Manchin voted for Sessions. And he's been voting like he’s best buds with the GOP and voting like a Republican and voicing support of Trump and his exec orders (any issue with the ban wasn’t the ban itself but with Trump not talking to enough people first to make sure it was air tight). He is all for Congress doing away with any and all environmental protections for coal country. Etc. Manchin loved his photo op last week with Gorsuch and obviously plans on voting for him. There really is no reason to have a Dem from his state. He'll pry get clobbered by a GOP next election--and Trump will campaign bigly for that guy. Manchin will go the way of Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.

Tax cuts and no regulations real reason to finish factory. Looks like the only one paying taxes in this country is the middle class and the poor.=======================================

Trump is 2nd president to tout unfinished Intel factory

By JOSH BOAK - The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump on Wednesday held up Intel's plan to invest more than $7 billion in an Arizona factory as a win for his economic agenda, but it's also a reminder that not all corporate commitments come to fruition.

Trump was the second president to celebrate the computer chip maker's attempts to expand its domestic production at the same facility in Chandler, Arizona.

In 2012, Obama went to the factory's construction site and celebrated that the plant would produce "some of the fastest and most powerful computer chips on Earth."

"Let's stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas," Obama said at the time. "Let's reward companies like Intel that are investing and creating jobs right here in the United States of America."

But by 2014, however, Intel had pulled back from finishing the factory. The company said Wednesday that it expects to open the plant known as "Fab 42" within four years.

.... Krzanich said he made the announcement from the White House because "it's really in support of the tax and regulatory policies that we see the administration pushing forward."

And I love this other breaking news saying that Trump wanted to hold off the ban but was told no. I saw that on my TV scrawl and the looked it up. He said he wanted to hold off on the ban for a month but law enforcement overrode his wishes. Yeah right.

Speaking of retard, what's this about Palin becoming the ambassador to our Canada? How much per diem will Palin charge to sleep in her own bed in Wasilla? You know that scam artist will do everything possible to keep money flowing into her coffer.

Canadians say fuck that, that bitch and her family trekked in the middle of the night crossing over our boarder for free health care.

Kind of ironic, Sarah wants a wall to keep Mexicans out of America while she crossed our boarder for free shit.

No shit, 9:56. Daddy Chuckles proudly boasted in her "book" that the fuckin' brood would sneak across the border to Whitehorse for free healthcare, on the Canadian taxpayers' dime!

Gryphen, as a life-long true patriot Canadian, I implore you, it's time to unleash the hounds of hell! Anything that your sources have on palin must be released NOW! It's less than two months until April Fools Day - this rumour cannot be true!

It's time to put up a DMZ between Alaska and Yukon to keep the fuckin' heaths and palins OUT!!

About Me

This blog is dedicated to finding the truth, exposing the lies, and holding our politicians and leaders accountable when they fall far short of the promises that they have made to both my fellow Alaskans and the American people.